This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Once we're in the territory of 'magic pills' why not have the pill allow them to be happy with their natal bodies?
Would your magic pill for anorexia help them loose weight or keep them alive without eating?
A pill that lets one cope with the lack of (bodily, in this case) freedom rather than provide more freedom is inherently more suspect and abusable. Or in other words, it serves the interests of those who reject transhumanist ideals and want everyone to remain in the image that they were born in, and this is why trans people, when queried, generally reject that idea in favor of the free sex change pill.
Similarly I would rather be more attractive than be able to tolerate the fruits of being less attractive; would rather be able to achieve my goals with less work than be able to work more, etc. "Be happy with natal bodies" pill is the proposal of the conformist solution rather than the personal freedom one. It is, although I admit it's a stretch, akin to "curing" the black men's desire for freedom rather than making them more suited for independent life.
How is serving the interests of those who endorse transhumanist ideals, and want everyone to freely chose their image despite how they were born, any less suspect?
Like, I can respect your views if you're a transhumanist, but it's ridiculous to act like your views are correct by default, and don't require any backing argument.
Weird, I've never seen them express negative sentiments towards anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, or ADHD medication. How is a "stop making me want to kill myself pill" different from a "stop making me want to kill myself because I want to be a woman" pill?
More options
Context Copy link
The rebuttal is just insisting that transness is not really about being in the wrong body, but a deeper issue that wouldn't be resolved by giving the trans person what they think they want. The more analogous to "treating" schizophrenia by staging "arrests" of their "gang stalkers," or performing "surgeries" to remove the "tracking devices" they're convinced have been installed in them, and expecting this to work out.
More options
Context Copy link
These don't seem similar, though. If we applied the framework of these things to being trans, it would mean that a transwoman isn't someone who simply feels like a woman and thus wants to change his body to match it, it's someone whose goal is for other humans to treat him like a woman (analogous to your 1st example) or whose goal is to physically appear as a woman (analogous to your 2nd). Those are different things.
It's also not clear to me how it's more freedom to change one's body than to change one's mind. From my experience, changing one's body quite drastically is often quite easy, but changing one's mind even a little is often quite difficult. It's fundamentally difficult to compare the two, but I'd argue that being able to manipulate our minds as freely as we manipulate our physical bodies is more transhumanist, not less, than just wanting to manipulate our physical bodies to match our minds. I think, to most people, a non-humanoid like a cartoon cat or non-android robot that seems to think and behave like a human is "more human" in some sense than something that appears biologically like a human but seems to think and behave in a way that's completely foreign to humans. At the extremes, I think that people consider ChatGPT "more human" in some way than an android sex doll. So it seems to me that if we want to transcend our humanity, having the freedom to manipulate our minds as easily as taking a pill is at least as significant as having the freedom to manipulate our physical bodies to be the other sex.
This is true, but what I'm getting at is that it has the failure mode of the ruling factions being able to breed slave castes that literally can't rebel and can't stand the thought of it, much like house elves in Harry Potter. Or insular societies becoming more and more ossified by making their children incapable of dissent.
But calling those "failure modes" seems, in itself, to be against transhumanism. You or I with our value systems shaped by our human society and human biology and psychology might find those to be failures, but who knows how someone who's transcended their humanity would judge it? Fundamentally, there's no way to tell, and so if we want to keep in the spirit of transhumanism, we ought to keep our minds open.
I'm also skeptical that the typical person encountering this hypothetical is considering the things that you're positing, not even implicitly or subconsciously.
I have seen people proposed with this hypothetical and they did not, contrary to the "NPC" narrative, immediately shut down and blare system error alarms.
Such is the trap of value systems, you can't really live without one and any sort of conscious change to yours may run against your current one, like in the tale of Gandhi and the pacifism-reducing pills. Even those mindsets that the orthodox consider "deviation" and "degeneracy" are, by definition, part of the human condition. There is nothing in the Codex of Transhumanism that says we ought to keep our minds so open that anything can fall in.
Sure, and that's not an argument against what I pointed out. Again, there's no particular reason to believe that those societies would be "failure modes" of a transhuman future.
Like, the whole house elf analogy just reminds me of Brave New World, which was a novel that played around with that concept quite a bit more than in Harry Potter. I don't see any good reason why a transhumanist wouldn't consider that society a perfectly cromulent one. And personally, I would see that world as a very good one to live in, if not to aim for achieving in our own.
Perhaps if you interrogated a perfect spherical example of a transhuman whose literally only value is "transhumanity", they'd agree that a transhuman future that replicates the power inequalities and the downtrodding of the below by the above is no less good than a transhuman future which exemplifies Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.
I don't see how this responds to anything I wrote. The idea that a house elf in Harry Potter or an elevator operator in Brave New World is "downtrodden" due to "power inequalities" is, in itself a rejection of transhumanism. It just seems to me like you're just trying to have your cake and eat it too.
To get back to the topic of this scifi gender-dysphoria-B-gone pill vs sex-change-down-to-the-molecular-level surgery, I still contend that a desire for transhumanism can't support the latter without supporting the former. There could be other reasons for supporting the latter without supporting the former, but that'd be something like believing in the sanctity of the mind over body. Which many people do believe in, on the basis of the eternal soul. But which also isn't convincing to people who don't believe in souls.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To me this sounds like the sort of rationalization you hear from people non-compliant with their meds or treatment.
Many bipolar people enjoy the mania, anorexics like losing weight. Their family and doctors just want them 'normal' and fat.
If wanting the goal of medical treatment to be a return to a natural state of health is a rejection of 'transhumanist ideals', ok.
This would be the state of medical progress as exhibited by hunter-gatherer tribes who are limited to mending acquired injuries. In all other cases, such as inborn defects and genetic predispositions? If they die, they die.
The "natural state of health" is way too low of a bar even if you set immortality ambitions aside.
Trans ideology and transhumanist ideals seem more likely to lead to suicide than immortality. Personal and cultural / civilizational suicide. This shouldn't be surprising that the wages of sin is death, has been long known.
Natural state of health just means free of pathology, physical and mental.
As opposed to?
the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord
To me this sounds like the sort of
rationalizationbaseless promises societies employ to keep people compliant after they realize that death doesn't scare them anymore.Even from within an entirely materialistic frame, even stripped entirely of any reference to specific religions, "the wages of sin is death, but righteousness preserves and sustains life perpetually" seems to me not only evident, but unavoidable.
Have you ever had a close personal relationship with an addict, or with someone suffering from serious trauma? An abuse or rape victim, for example? Have you observed the consequences of serious cruelty or selfishness in detail over time? Do you have personal experience of despair?
it is possible to both observe and to experience the destruction of the self from an entirely materialist frame. Likewise, it is possible to observe life that transcends individual mortality: there are vital parts of me that did not come from me, but which live on as an extension of my ancestors, physical and memetic, and which I hope will live on long after I am gone in both my children and in those whose lives I influence.
Against this, it seems to me that you are offering warmed-over 90s-era tits-and-beer Liberal Atheism: people just need to be free to follow their bliss, and anyone saying otherwise is just an uptight square. There's a reason that meme has largely died out, even among Atheists, in favor of increasing recognition of some sort of moral frame with enforcement mechanisms for violations, and that reason might be encapsulated in the observation that Bill Clinton, the avatar-champion of tits-and-beer liberalism, was in fact a rapist.
We tried "follow your bliss". It did not lead to Bliss, but to misery and wretchedness. Tits-and-beer Liberal Atheism carried the field when it was novel and when no one knew for sure what the consequences would be. Now we see the consequences.
More options
Context Copy link
People are largely horrible. The pressure keeps them from being as horrible. Remove the pressure and people become more horrible and more people become horrible.
As a social / civilizational technology it's produced better outcomes for those that have used it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link